[…] and what they had to tell us about the state’s activities in Northern Ireland and the UK; and related to that are a couple about the wider ‘Wilson plots’. And the basic question which runs through Lobster and this book – how much interference from the secret state, or secret states, has there been? […]
Footy and me I did two things with Paul Foot. Over two days, he, Colin Wallace and I copy-edited the manuscript of what became Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? Foot was impressively objective about his own writing, accepting editing suggestions on their merits. During a lunch break he said to me: ‘What’s a bright guy […]
Colin Crawford. London: Pluto Press, 2003, £14.99, p/back When World-in-Action and Tribune journalist David Boulton published his excellent book, The UVF, 1966-73, (Torc Books, 1974) he bemoaned a near absence of valuable books and journal articles on Loyalism. In contrast to their Republican counterparts, Loyalists do not have a substantive support base overseas; nor […]
[…] the cold war. Willan’s Puppet Masters shows this process at work in post-war Italy, while the role of J. J. Angleton in fomenting right-wing discontent with the Wilson governments points to a CIA connection with the plots to destabilise the 1964-70 and 1974-79 Labour administrations (see Peter Wright, Spycatcher: the Candid Autobiography of a […]
[…] Sunday Times. They aren’t. And even on a quick skim those extracts are clearly dubious. Wright’s account of an unwilling MI5 having James Angleton’s paranoia about Harold Wilson thrust upon it wouldn’t withstand an afternoon’s research by any of the journalists who have so enthusiastically recycled Wright’s allegations. And are we really to believe […]
[…] forgeries were the work of some branch of the British secret state and were part of the attempts in 1974-76 to discredit the Labour governments of Harold Wilson. Ted Knight fits perfectly the role of the ‘deep entryist’ mole who appears to have been ‘expelled’ from or left an extremist group but actually retains […]
[…] Robin Whittaker (in particular), Rom, Jane Affleck, Terry Hanstock, anon in Dubai, Chris Tame, Robert Henderson, Peter Watson and David Turner for information. Thanks to Chris Gordon- Wilson for a donation of £50. This is a belting good issue, in my view, with a wide variety of top-drawer material – but I tend to […]
Are raw prawns pink? Fun and games Down Under where a great brouhaha developed over allegations that Australia’s most famous – and left-wing historian, the late Manning Clark, was a Soviet agent. It started when the Australian poet Sid Murray reported that 26 years before he had seen Clark at a dinner wearing the Order […]
Introduction The mid 1970s was not a good time to be a social democratic ally of the United States. In Britain we had “the Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “security scandal’; in New […]
Editorially First, most important, our thanks to those Lobster subscribers who responded to our appeal for money. Your response, and a bit of ‘consulting’ with Fleet St. on the content of Lobster 11, has halved our debts. We shall survive. It is tempting to say something about the developing crisis re the Wilson-MI5 story (Lobstergate?). […]
